Scientific Representation, Denotation, and Fictional Entities

Abstract

Abstract:I critically review RIG Hughes' Denotation-Demonstration-Interpretation account of scientific representation, focusing in particular on the representation of fictional entities in science. I find the original account lacking, but argue that it can be extended in suitable ways. In particular I argue that an extension of this account that weakens the denotation and interpretation conditions can accommodate fictions. This extension also reveals the essential deflationary nature of scientific representation, by bringing into relief the functional roles of denotation and interpretation.Keywords: Scientific Representation, Modelling, Fictions, Denotation. 2 IntroductionThe influential Denotation-Demonstration-Interpretation (DDI) account of representation was developed in a short pioneering paper by RIG Hughes (1997). My purpose in this paper is to assess the DDI model in light of present day interest on the nature of fictional entities in science. I argue that the DDI model faces an insurmountable difficulty in dealing with such entities. However, an extended version of the DDI account may accommodate fictional entities. While the resulting account is more complex, this may just reflect the complexity of representation itself. In addition the extended version is clearer with respect to the key question regarding the deflationary nature of representation, since it makes it patent that representation is not a relation between its source and target systems, but a functional property of models within a representational practice.In the first section, I review the original DDI proposal, emphasizing the role that the relation of denotation plays in this proposal. In the second section, I discuss and emphasize the deflationary nature of the DDI account. In section 3 I briefly review some examples of scientific fictions, particularly Maxwell's vortex model of the ether, and show that the DDI account fails to accommodate them. I argue instead for a weakening of the denotation and interpretation relations into correlative functional notions. The conclusion emphasizes the deflationary nature of the suitably extended account, and how it reveals that representation is not a relation per se, although it can be instantiated by means of certain relations in certain contexts. The Denotation-Demonstration-Interpretation (DDI) accountThe DDI account of representation was introduced by RIG Hughes in his now classic paper (Hughes, 1997). In order to outline and assess the DDI account we need first to fix some neutral terminology. We shall say that, in model-building science, a model source A typically represents a target B. This terminology implies no constraints on what types of objects A and B may be: These may be concrete or abstract, physical or mathematical, real or imaginary. Neither does it preclude the standard view according to which any scientific model must have a target in the real world and 3 represent it via relations that hold between the properties of both source and target.Indeed, as discussed below, the standard...

Scientific Representation: An Inferentialist-Expressivist Manifesto

“…Suárez's version of inferentialism was deflationary; it insisted that there was no single relation between models and targets to be found. The complex and varied practices of drawing surrogative inferences from models constitute their representational capacity (Suárez 2004(Suárez , 2010(Suárez , 2015bSuárez and Solé 2006;Suárez and Pero 2019). Critics have argued forcefully that Suárez's characterization of the inferential practices underwriting representation is overly vague and that his deflationism is unmotivated (Contessa 2007;Nguyen 2017, 2020).…”

Scientific modelling with diagrams

“…It is widely acknowledged that misrepresentations are a subset of representations. To deny this would be to require that representations be veridical, which is an implausible requirement for models (Suárez 2015). In short, diamonds did represent the template units of amino acids, albeit incorrectly.…”

“…I endorse one important modification to Hughes' (1997) account 5 : 'denotation' and 'interpretation' should be interpreted non-veridically. That is, denotation need not imply the target's existence, and interpretation need not imply truth (Suárez 2015).…”